Sunday, July 15, 2012

Inescapable Joy

Joy -

As I have settled home and spent time processing our time in Haiti, beyond the lessons in thankfulness and humility... ... I have found myself with a radically different perspective on joy. The joy they share is a deep deep joy that springs out now matter the season, no matter the weather, no matter the moment.

My friend Adam said it well to the children in Lira (Africa) as he prepared to leave,

"You children have a joy that so many people in America wish they
could have, yet they fail to see the way to experience the real joy that
you experience. We always say that we are coming here to do all these
things and give you children something that you need. We forget to say
that when we come here, you give us something that we need. We are in
debt to you, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as you. You
are co-heirs with Jesus Christ, and your joy that comes from Him
overflows into our cups." http://adamneil.blogspot.com/

Everywhere I go on the web, people are sharing the same thing... Ann Voskamp shared the same lesson during her very recent trip to Haiti,

Hope, it is exquisitely fragile and it is an exceptional force and it is essential to faith and you can’t afford to lose it. Lose your fears but never your hope.
The whole church fills with this trumpeting worship and we raise our hands and sway and hope can create a quake that cracks all despair. Our smiles can be real epicenters. Christ-centered joy that brings down all the walls.
There is hope here — a hope refrain that won’t end. Hope, it lives in us, in Christ Who is in us. And how can the horns not herald it, even here: Never despair of a situation more than you trust in your Savior.
It isn’t the likelihood of your hope that sustains you, but the object of your hope that sustains you. http://www.aholyexperience.com

Joy - something so desperately necessary all the time... but especially in this time, in this place. As a backyard people in a fast paced world, we crash every night longing for something we can't always find, and hunger for a food that lasts... but in lands distant, where poverty and hunger and war and disease are battled EVERY DAY, there is joy, there is hope, there is peace.